Virtualization is a technology which allows one computer to do the job of multiple computers by sharing resources of a single computer across multiple systems. Through the use of virtualization, multiple operating systems and applications can run on the same computer at the same time, thereby increasing utilization and flexibility of hardware. For example, virtualization allows servers to be decoupled from underlying hardware, thus resulting in multiple virtual machines sharing the same physical server hardware. Load balancing is used to distribute client or server requests across multiple servers.